Rust, React, JavaScript, Python top Stack Overflow survey

Paul Krill |
March 23, 2017

The programming community's survey also finds that many developers are newcomers to the field.

The most wanted languages were Python (20.8 percent), JavaScript (18.6), and Go (13.5). "Python shot to the most-wanted language this year (as in, the language developers want to use this year more than any other), after ranking fourth last year," Stack Overflow said. Hanlon cited Python's usage in data science and its interest among developers as boosting its popularity. The list of most dreaded languages -- the ones developers are currently using but want to drop -- was headed by Visual Basic 6 (88.3 percent), followed by VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and CoffeeScript.

The most loved frameworks, meanwhile, were Facebook's React (66.9 percent), Node.js (62.1), and Microsoft's .Net Core (60.9). Node.js also took the title of most wanted framework (22.2), followed by Angular (19.4), and React (18.9). The most dreaded frameworks were Cordova (61.2), Xamarin (51.3), and Hadoop (51.2).

When it came to types of developers, Stack Overflow found 72.6 percent of respondents were developing for the web, 28.9 percent built desktop applications, 23 percent were mobile developers, and 14.4 percent classified themselves as database administrators.

One lopsided statistic Stack Overflow found again pertained to gender: 88.6 percent of respondents were male, 7.6 percent were female, and 2.6 percent classified themselves as other, gender nonconforming, or transgender. Still, the percentage of female participants was better than last year, when females accounted for 5.6 percent of respondents.